Light & Wonder chief exec Matt Wilson’s rise to the top of gaming
It’s been a wild ride for Matt Wilson from growing up in Sydney suburbia to running one of the world’s biggest gaming companies in Las Vegas, that now wants to list on the ASX.
The Presidential Suite at the five-star Four Seasons Hotel in New York City features stunning views over Manhattan and living room walls with embossed leather panels and cerused Japanese Tamo ash, while the bedroom walls are wrapped in Thai silk.
A Steinway Grand Piano is centrepiece, while the mantels of the stunning fireplace are crafted of Italian Gialo Sahara marble. In May 2019, Matt Wilson spent a night there he will never forget.
“I rang my wife and told her, ‘I feel like Pretty Woman here!’ I also asked myself many times ‘What I am doing here, a young Australian guy from the Sutherland Shire?’,” he recalls.
Wilson, who went to school at Sydney’s Newington College and university in Wollongong, was then the US boss of Australian gaming machine maker Aristocrat.
At 25 he’d left Australia to work in Asia for Aristocrat before moving to America, where he took the firm from a distant number five in the market to number one.
He’d been summoned to New York in 2019 by billionaire businessman Ron Perelman, who boasted a business empire spanning cosmetics and Forbes magazine to gaming, including a fledgling firm called Scientific Games.
That day an intimidating but gracious Perelman offered Wilson the role of CEO of gaming at the firm.
“Someone had told me going into that meeting that if he likes you and he thinks that you are a good fit for the job, he’ll push a note pad across the table and say, ‘Put your number on the page, tell me what it will take for you to join the company.’ So lo and behold, he puts the notepad across the table,” the latter recalls.
“Having known about that beforehand, I knew I didn’t want to negotiate against myself. So I said, ‘Just make me a compelling offer’. For me, it was more about the opportunity than the financials.”
That night they dined at Fleming by Le Bilboquet, Perelman’s chic French restaurant on New York’s Upper East Side directly beneath his office, where celebrities – including actor Woody Harrelson – came and went all evening.
Weeks earlier Wilson had been invited to the 10th annual Apollo in the Hamptons at the billionaire’s palatial East Hampton home, which featured performances by the Black Eyed Peas, Dave Matthews Band, Jon Bon Jovi, Patti Labelle and Jamie Foxx.
Rise to the top
It is now history that Wilson resigned from Aristocrat in June 2019, spent nine months on gardening leave and started at Scientific Games in March 2020.
In September that year, just as the Covid-19 pandemic had fully taken hold, Perelman revealed he was selling his stake in the company and negotiations commenced with several potential buyers.
One was an Australian consortium headed by former Aristocrat CEO and Wilson’s long-time mentor Jamie Odell, and his former chief financial officer there, Toni Korsanos. They were backed by former Aristocrat investors Caledonia Investments and Ellerston Capital.
“It was a dream come true to be honest. It meant that collectively we’d be able to build a plan and have the patience to see it through,” Wilson says.
Over the past two years Wilson, Odell – who is now chairman – and Korsanos have reshaped the Scientific Games portfolio of assets, removing two businesses, SG Lotteries and OpenBet, and refocused the firm on content.
Last April it changed its name to Light & Wonder – a play on the visuals of its products – and it now has three platforms for growth: land-based gaming, social gaming and real money gaming online.
For Wilson, who was appointed CEO in October last year, it has been an amazing journey from growing up in the Shire to running one of the world’s big gaming companies in Las Vegas.
The Nasdaq-listed Light & Wonder is now briefing Australian investors on a potential secondary listing on the ASX, designed to accelerate the company’s strategic journey as a global leader in cross-platform games.
Wilson says the move, if it proceeds, will enhance the company’s profile and give it access to new, long-term Australian institutional investors that will complement its already strong existing base of shareholders in the US and Australia.
It will also fill a void left by the disappearance of Crown Resorts from the public market after its takeover last year by US real estate powerhouse Blackstone.
“It is pretty interesting the number of Australians going into the gaming industry and their impact on the industry. Whether it’s on the operator side or the supplier side. Australians massively punch above their weight there and I think that extends to investors as well,” Wilson says, noting the reception at investor briefings for the listing has so far been “very positive”.
“Investors in Australia have a deep appreciation of the sector, they know it well. They understand how the economics work. It is largely recurring revenue in nature at present. I think many of them had success investing in Aristocrat and this is a specific business that has many of the same characteristics.”
It is also launching direct-to-consumer platforms to reach to new players, as it aims to lift in earnings by 15 per cent a year from $US913m in 2022 to $US1.4bn in 2025.
“The thing I really like about where we are at strategically is the three businesses in the portfolio are really built around great game content. We deploy that on slot machines, then we tweak that content and deploy it in our social casino business. You tweak it again and deploy it in the gaming channel. So every $1 of investment in research and development we can sweat across these three businesses that they fit together,” Wilson says.
“Not only are we now financially a much more robust and sound organisation but we are also a streamlined and focused organisation. I think we’ve ended up in a really good spot.”
Early years
It seems hard to believe now, but after graduating from university with a commerce marketing degree in 2004, Wilson had no idea what he wanted to do.
He applied for a marketing role with Fairfax newspapers after doing some work with the group during his university years. He also applied for a role at Aristocrat. He was offered both.
“I went to my dad as the classic 21 year old who says, ‘I don’t really know which one to take’. My Dad’s classic line was ‘Son, you need to go and work with the newspaper company. People will read newspapers until the end of time. That was in 2003 when everything started to shift to digital. So luckily, I didn’t take his advice and I went to work for Aristocrat,” he recalls.
In 2007 he made a move that would change his life when he decided to move to the Chinese gaming Mecca of Macau. But first he needed to have a diplomatic conversation with his then girlfriend Susannah. It was not initially to her liking.
“I told her ‘I just got this great opportunity, I’m moving to Macau, and you can come if you want.’ She just replied, ‘No, try that again.’ So I said, ‘Oh, I’m going to Macau. Will you please come with me?’ She then smiled and said, ‘That’s better. Yes, I will.’ So anyway, the best decision I made was reframing that question,” he says.
They were in Macau for five years.
“That part of the world was just exploding. A casino would open every three months. So it was just it was an amazing time. The Aristocrat role leading the sales group in Asia Pacific covered Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore and even Japan. So my now wife and I got to travel all over Asia. It was just an amazing opportunity to get immersed in a different culture and be part of a growing business.”
Wilson eventually got the opportunity to move to America as Aristocrat’s vice president of marketing, where he worked directly with Odell and Korsanos.
He says the former “understands deeply” what it takes to turn around a gaming business, as he did at Aristocrat and then more recently at Light & Wonder.
“Jamie was the architect of the success of Aristocrat and many of us played a role in that with him. His ability to synthesise strategy and culture, I’ve never seen anyone like that. He just knows how to motivate people and bring them together. Toni’s cut from that same cloth. It just gives us great confidence now at Light & Wonder that we can do something pretty special,” Wilson says.
Twelve years after his fateful conversation with Susannah in 2007, in 2019 she convinced him to take the Scientific Games job offered by Perelman.
She played upon her husband’s passion – which continues to this day – for competing in marathons and triathlons.
“To her I was like ‘It’s a big change and a big opportunity and there are a set of challenges that come with that’. But she’s like, ‘You do these things on the weekends for fun, you like to do hard things and this seems like a hard thing. So why don’t you do it?’ It was the best decision I made from a career standpoint,” Wilson says.
He now says he could not have navigated the past few years, especially during the pandemic, without her. He lost his beloved grandmother, Valerie, in early 2020.
“In the pandemic we just felt so far away. We had my grandmother die and other health issues in the family. I just felt so frustrated that you couldn’t get back in the country,” he says.
“Fortunately I saw her about a month before she passed away. She got stomach cancer and within a month was gone. She always said that was the way she wanted to go out, to make it quick. The way I remember her was being so vibrant and healthy, so I think she would appreciate that I last saw her that way.”
Wilson and his wife now have three girls aged ten, eight and seven. While they live in Las Vegas, they also have a home at Laguna Beach which Wilson quips “keeps my wife committed to the US”.
There are aspects of America that remain confronting.
“Part of the US school system, which is a little scary, is when they start kindergarten they do active shooter drills. Five or six year olds should not have to worry about that. But they do,” he laments.
But he still sees America as the land of opportunity and has no plans to return home. After the dislocation of the Covid-19 years, he is most excited to be back in the office with the people who will pilot the next growth phase for Light & Wonder.
“I’m a pretty extroverted guy so I get a lot of energy and give a lot of energy by walking the floor and having face-to-face interactions. That is my leadership style and the benefit of that is people are candid with me, they will tell me if there are problems,” he says.
“I think that’s half the battle with leadership, especially in the CEO role. These roles can be very lonely. It is never easy trying to get to the heart of what’s really going on and what the real issues are that need to be dealt with. To the extent that your employee base is willing to be open with you, that goes a long way.”